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Friday, June 13, 2008

The Friday Link Thingy

Let's try this, see how it goes - every Friday, if I remember, I'll try to post a link or a movie/TV recommendation, just for my own amusement, but also to try and do some shorter posts...

Today's link - well, four - is a fascinating interview with Patrick McGoohan in 1977, talking about The Prisoner - the making of the show, the inspiration, and the meaning behind some of it. It's broken into four parts, and if you liked the show *at all*, this is required viewing. You need to have seen all the episodes, as there be MAJOR spoilers for the show here (and obviously the interview will make very little sense and be incredibly boring if you haven't seen the show at all):

It's particularly good for the insights into straightforward TV production issues. In the last post, I mentioned that sometimes you'll have to make something up at the last minute, and how those things can occasionally be the most interesting moments, for whatever reason. Part 2 has two great examples of this - Rover (the balloon) and the western episode. They had a clear series bible, right down to the design of the thing, but like any other show, sometimes they had to make stuff up and hope for the best. TV is a hungry beast, and you have to keep feeding it - a big part of the job is just getting those episodes out on time.

The Prisoner!! One of my all-time faves. So far the plans I have heard for the remake didn't sound horrible. That's something at least. If you can find the original soundtrack for the series (I picked up a CD in a used CD shop in Japan a few years back), I'd definitely recommend that too.

There must be something wrong with me. My aunt loves The Prisoner and I watched the first ep. Wonderful, really liked it. Then I watched two more and lost interest. What did I do wrong? (Will hopefully be visiting Portmeirion in a few weeks, too. Er ... not that you care ...)